The Last 40 Minutes Home

Yes, I am home! Yesterday was long but good. I was up at 5 AM, ready with the car packed by 6 AM, and heading to meet a friend for breakfast. We had a really wonderful time together; remember that wonderful can include lots of tears, too. Man, why is good, honest, sharing conversation so good for our hearts?

Two and a half hours later we were red-eyed but lighter in heart for having talked about our walks with God through the past year and even sharing some things from long ago that God is using to minster to us today. Hard but good.

During the chat, part of my sharing was about how many things I wrestled with in my relationship with God during the first seven months of this year. It's a long ol' list of things that I frankly wound up being mad, sometimes angry, about, and not understanding. Lots of hard things happened in the first few months of 2008, and I think there were some lingering questions from 2007.

One of the lingering things was poverty. The poverty I had seen in Uganda. The suffering. The pain. The stench. The filth. The hunger. My tidy theology of suffering and my apologetics training broke down. I felt broken. These were people suffering as a result of extraordinary misery inflicted upon them. It was not laziness, it was not disinterest. They had been striped of any means to rescue a life of decency out of their days, trapped in government camps. They were left impotent.

I came home and talked to missionaries who had spent most of their living and serving in areas of deep poverty. They had seen things just like this. What did they do to cope? How does this picture of the world reside within, or anywhere near, my picture of God and his goodness? From people who had lived on almost every continent, the answer was the same: "We don't know why Jesus said, 'The poor you will always have with you.' But once you're broken, you're broken."

I mentioned this deep poverty to my friend (she's about my folk's age) yesterday morning as one of the things I don't think I had resolved, so it added to my anger and struggle this year. I have more trust in God about it now, but I am still overwhelmed with sorrow at the memories of it. My first walk through an AIDS hospice, touching and praying for the patients. My first walk through an internally displaced persons camp. My first eye-to-eye experience with a rail-thin mother, holding her baby boy, his stomach bloated from malnutrition and lack of food. She talked and told me her story while Tony translated. My first walk near over-filled latrines, the stench invading the camp, that immediately made me stop breathing and walk faster, until I made myself slow down and breathe it in, reminding myself, "This is what humanity smells like. You will not forget that these are people."

As I relayed these images to my friend yesterday morning, she raised her eyebrows slightly. "I wonder what that says about our spiritual poverty." I said I had never heard that before. She said she had never thought it before; it had just come to her. I told her I was really intrigued by the thought, and would chew on it during my 11+ hour drive home.

I asked God about it when I got on the road, "Lord is there something in there you want me to see? Something to know about you? About us?" Quiet.

I checked again in the middle of the drive, thinking He might give me something to think about for the hours ahead. Still quiet.

Forty minutes from home, on the winding curves through a dark Jordan Valley, full moon above giving light to the fields and rocks and walls of the canyon, He sprung it on me. Pierced. I yelped out and cried at the same time. The crying became sobbing, gasping, blubbering. And cries of, "That's me, that's me! Oh my God, that's me!"

To be continued...